Por IND [Inter National Design]

El concurso internacional Vivienda de Vanguardia (VIVA) organizado por el Ministerio de Vivienda de España convocaba no solamente a contribuir con soluciones de vivienda avanzadas, sino que hacia un alto énfasis en la relación de la nueva arquitectura con el entorno urbano bajo el lema ‘Hacemos Ciudad’. La vivienda protegida tenia como destinatarios a los ciudadanos menos favorecidos y como es de esperarse en vivienda publica tenia un ajustado presupuesto. Continue reading…

The TV programme “Los Reporteros” by Canal Sur presents its special edition for the 20th anniversary of Expo´92 in Seville. It was a great and very special period in the city´s history and for its inhabitants. We relive the same emotions through the eyes of the photographers who worked days and nights recording everything related to the Expo, its spaces, art, events and people. Today, thanks to Fernando Alda, Pepe Morón, Anna Elías, Luís Castilla, Atin Aya and Emilio Sanmartín the Expo´s archive has at its disposal great quantity of material that is being digitalized. For the moment around 40 thousand has been photographs processed.

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This Thursday, the 1st of March 2012, a Sevillian art gallery El Fotomata will launch an exhibition by Fernando Alda “The poetry of a skeleton”, under the patronage by Gabriel Campuzano. We are honoured to invite you to the opening of the exhibition and to visit it at later stage, as it will be open until the 27th of April 2012.

Below you can find the presentation letter.

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By Juan Domingo Santos

Something happened during the past years that ended up in destabilizing our relationship with the city and the cityscape. We have lived some time, from which it seemed that we would never wake up. A time when we witnessed an indecent waste and missuse, a merciless abuse of the power, we were made believe that everything is possible in exchange to nothing, time of an outrageous and limitless speculation, which concequences are still far from being measurable. Step by step, unnoticed, a wave of bad taste and corruption invaded us, and it is finishing off our landscapes and the memory of a place. Cancerous urban surroundings and never ending stripping of the identity, horrible housing estates abandoned in the countryside, intustrial zones and shopping centres in the middle of nowhere, the skyscrapers and residential establishments deserted due to overconstruction, crossing the limits of the sustainable and necessary, unexplainable buildings, out of scale and size next to La Vega… We have burried the cityscape of Granada, opening the door to a disproportionately ugly and unimaginetive city. Buy, sell, permute, requalify land or exchange units of urban use have been the usual procedures for constructing our city, without addressing a project that would protect the historical and landscape values of the place. We live in the era of ugliness and bewilderment, the era of urban planning agreements without money, a time of false promisses. Continue reading…

Marta Pelegrín Rodríguez and Fernando Pérez Blanco present their research and solutions for the urban obsolescence problem. To see the complete document please address the following link. This work is a continuation of a project created at an architectural workshop within the Foro barriadas, nuevos centros urbanos, organized by the Consejería de Vivienda y Ordenación del Territorio de la Junta de Andalucía (Department of Housing and Planning at the Junta de Andalucía) in 2006. At that occasion MEDIOMUNDO Arquitectos collaborated with Kauh Arquitectos (Juan Antonio Sánchez Muñoz and Vincent Morales Garoffolo), Fabio Orizia Pérez and Elías Pérez Lema. In 2011 Catherine Duncalfe and Philip Etchells joined the team.

Spain has a higher percentage of empty housing than any other country in the European Union. A quarter of these are located in Andalusia where they make up between 15 – 18 % of all housing in the region. Several initiatives have attempted to ameliorae the problem to little effect.

From 2006 we incorporated into the debate the need to reflect on and work with these empty spaces. In order to do so we began with the premise that this positive emptiness is not simply a symptom of exclusion, poor quality construction and speculation. We assigned them a potentially positive value as models, typologies and especially as possible sources of architectural revival.

To help solve the housing problem we proposed pinpointing and presenting these empty spaces as a way to potentially fulfil the demands and needs of their surroundings by rethinking their purpose.

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The article by Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, dated Sunday 29th of January 2012, talks about the tendency or need for transformation, extension and reparation of the architecture as an alternative to the new construction. The saturation of the market by the empty properties reinforced by the economical difficulties obliges to reinvent, recycle and take care of what we have. As an example of a mixture of restauration, remodeling and extension, the journalist presents Alameda Theatre in Tarifa (Cadiz, Spain). The project by Julia González and Miguel Bretones is a complex case, executed with a help of an archeologist and urban planner. “It constructs a bridge between the past and the future” without leaving the funcional needs unresolved, which  “constitutes today the most complete architecture”. Continue reading…

Last December the results of the 11th session of Europan competition were oficially announced. In the Spanish edition we have 5 winners, 7 runners-up and 7 honourable mentions. Among the European results there were 36 awarded Spanish teams: 9 winners, 15 runners-up and 12 honourable mentions. Among the awarded studios we are happy to see Donaire Arquitectos and with their proposal for urban-architectural stategies for the entrance point to the city of Graz in the neighbourhood of the Arnold Schwartzenegger Stadium.

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In this post we would like to present a recently photographed building in Valle Navarro de Salazar designed by Gutiérrez-Delafuente Arquitectos: Natalia Gutiérrez y Julio de la Fuente. The complete report on this project will be soon uploaded to our web, however we consider that this image, some drawings and the model, are worth anticipating.

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We would like to present a complimentary entry about the works on the Rehabilitation of Casa Pinillos designed by the architect Francisco Reina.

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Between the 4th and the 6th of November we took part in a workshop organized by Fotomata and conducted by a Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma, nevertheless we did not mention it here, as it seemed  it would have been impossible to transmit, even get close to, the extraordinary sensations we went through these days spent together. Last Saturday, by coincidence, we came across this photograph by Luís on the cover of a cultural supplement Babelia and we cannot avoid a small review of his work anymore.

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A few days ago we had a chance to see an Article by Zabalbeascoa Anatxu published in the newspaper El País, dated 23rd of October, 2011, and with a note od satisfaction we observe that the concise analysis of Culinary school in a former slaughterhouse in Medina Sidonia confirms all the impresions we had about the project, while realizing the photographic report and through the contact we had with its authors, the architects Juanjo González and María de la Cruz.

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A follow-up on the construction of the new public liberary in Ceuta (Spain) through a photographic site documentation. The Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos studio will continue to manage the execution of works, that have already started to reveal the richness and complexity of its interiors. Continue reading…

Hatje Cantz publishing house has just published the book Metropol Parasol. It is directed by the author of the project, architect Jürgen Mayer, and includes several specialized bilingual articles (in Spanish and English). Continue reading…

The journalist and historian Anatxu Zabalbeascoa writes regularly on architecture in different media (newspaper, blog and weekly extra) related to the newspaper El País, contributing to better understanding and dissemination of the last works in this field as well as in the design. In “The Country Weekly”, October 9th, she wrote an interesting article entitled “Performance at the periphery” which reviews a number of exemplary interventions from the point of view of their “singularity” – a concept that is undergoing reformulation, seeking a new life with other values, solid and permanent, as transformation, research, price, maintenance, location, visibility, sustainability, etc.

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This architectural intervention by the architects Ana Ruiz de Apodaca and Carmen Pérez Díaz is the winning entry for a competition held by the Town of Entrambasaguas, a small town in the Spanish region Cantabria near Santander. The competion task was to design a House of Culture on a site located near the doctor’s office and the church, and its proposal was to create “a symbiosis between the open and the constructed space”.

The building is slightly rotated around the axis of the street and the doctor´s office, “creating three open spaces. The first one is a green carpet that welcomes visitors and gives the perspective of the building access. The second space is a car park located in a less visible area bounded by the medical center and the House of Culture itself, that allows for a shared use of the car park. The last one is a garden as an extension of the House of Culture, that hosts a a health park for the ealdery people and tree areas”. Continue reading…

Italian magazine Casabella, in its 805 edition, publishes a wide selection of images from our report on the Interactive Museum of the History of Lugo, interventions by the architects Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, that we mentioned in the previous entry. The critical and descriptive text is accompanied by a set of drawings (plants, sections and construction details) that facilitate the understanding of this complex underground intervention and establish a perfect dialogue with the photographs of the work, taken at various times, the aerial shots that describe its urban presence and detail images show construction materials and finishes. Continue reading…

Arquitectura Viva publishes in its annual double edition No. 147-148 a selection of the best of Spanish architecture of the year. Among the works selected one can find our report on the Kindergarten Albolote (Grenada) by the architect Alejandro Muñoz Miranda. This work is characterized by strong geometry defined by bleached planes, that reflect light outwards, and the glazed openings that dye the light on its way to fill the interior space with color “and so the children pass on their daily walks joyfull spaces and playful dreamlike atmosphere, that experience constant change. Continue reading…